End of Days (1999)

End of Days arrives at the tail of 1999 with a proposition of admirable simplicity: Satan has come to New York, he needs a bride before midnight on December 31, and only a grieving bodyguard with a grenade can stop him. Peter Hyams directs with the grim efficiency of a man fulfilling a contractual obligation, and the result was greeted by critics as an overblown thriller with poor acting. The film wants to be a theological thriller and settles for being a loud one. Arnold Schwarzenegger prays, weeps over photographs of a dead family, and impales himself on a statue of the Archangel Michael. It is a lot of asking.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is a relic of a less self-aware era. The supporting cast includes CCH Pounder and Miriam Margolyes, both working professionals placed in the frame without editorial comment, which is the entire extent of the film's representational ambition. Robin Tunney's Christine is a chosen vessel to be guarded, carried, and finally rescued by a man, an arrangement unlikely to trouble any sociologist. The villain possesses an investment banker, and the hero once testified against corrupt police, but these are plot mechanics, not economic argument. There is no racial commentary, no environmental lament, no inquiry into body image, no consideration of neurodivergence. The film has other concerns, chiefly fire and screaming.

What remains is a sermon delivered as spectacle. The mythology is Christian and apocalyptic, the conflict is good against evil, and the dialogue is heavy with prophecy and damnation. Yet the moral instruction never arrives, because the movie is too busy blowing things up to lecture anyone. It is bloated, incoherent about its own mysticism, and oddly committed. Twenty-five years on, we can confirm that it remains exactly what it was: a very expensive, very sincere piece of nonsense that believes in nothing except the box office, and did not even win that argument. Toy Story 2 opened the same weekend and won instead.